Unusually warm waters and wetair fueled Hurricane Michael’s fury

Call it an October surprise: Hurricane
Michael strengthened unusually quickly
before slamming into the Florida
Panhandle on October 10 and remained
abnormally strong as it swept into
Georgia. The storm made landfall with
sustained winds of about 250 kilometers
per hour, just shy of a Category 5 storm,
making it the strongest storm ever to
hit the region, according to the National
Hurricane Center.

Warm ocean waters fuel hurricanes by
adding heat and moisture. By contrast,
the drier air over land strips storms
of strength. So hurricanes nearing the
Florida Panhandle, a curving landmass
surrounding the northeastern Gulf of
Mexico, tend to weaken as they pull in
drier air from land. But waters in the Gulf
that were about 1 to 2 degrees Celsius
warmer than average for early October
and abundant moisture in the air over
the eastern United States helped to
supercharge Michael.

Although it is not possible to attribute the generation of any one storm to
climate change, scientists have long predicted that warming ocean waters would
lead to more-intense hurricanes. Recent
attribution studies have borne out that
prediction, suggesting that very warm
waters in the tropical Atlantic helped fuel

Bees took a break duringthe Great American Eclipse

When the Aug. 21, 2017 total solar
eclipse hit totality and the sky went dark,
bees noticed.

Microphones in flower patches at

11 sites in the eclipse’s path in Oregon,
Idaho and Missouri picked up the buzzing sounds of bees flying among blooms
before and after totality. But those
sounds were noticeably absent during
the full solar blackout.

Dimming light and some coolingduring the onset of the eclipse didn’tappear to make a difference to the bees.But the deeper darkness of totality did,researchers report online October 10in the Annals of the Entomological Societyof America. The change in buzzing wasabrupt at totality, says study coauthorand ecologist Candace Galen of theUniversity of Missouri in Columbia.Buzzing resumed soon after totality.The study provides the first formaldata published on bees during a solareclipse, as far as Galen knows. “Insects areremarkably neglected,” she says. “Every-body wants to know what their dog andcat are doing during the eclipse, but theydon’t think about the flea.” — Susan Milius

In one grave lay a roughly 10-year-old
child, possibly the victim of malaria, with
a stone inserted in his or her mouth.

That practice was part of a funeral ritual
intended to prevent the youngster from
rising zombielike and spreading disease
to the living, researchers say.

The team found this “vampire burial”
at the Cemetery of the Babies, a mid-fifth
century site in Italy. The results will be
presented in January at a meeting of the
Archaeological Institute of America.

A malaria outbreak in the region killedmany babies and young children aroundthe time of the child’s burial. Bones ofseveral kids buried there have yieldedDNA of malaria parasites. Many of thechildren were accompanied by objectsassociated with beliefs in witchcraft andmagic, such as raven talons and toadbones. Stones had been placed on thehands and feet of a 3-year-old, anotherpractice used by various cultures to keepthe dead in their graves.

Such rituals attempted to keep whatever evil that people thought had fatally
contaminated bodies from getting out,
says classical archaeologist David Soren
of the University of Arizona in Tucson,
who participated in the dig. — Bruce Bower

BODY & BRAIN

People who have a good sense ofsmell are also good navigators

We may truly be led by our noses. A senseof smell and a sense of navigation arelinked in our brains, scientists propose.Neuroscientist Louisa Dahmani andcolleagues asked 57 people to navigatethrough a virtual town on a computerscreen before being tested on how wellthey could get from one spot to another.The same people’s smelling abilitieswere also scrutinized. After a sniff ofone of 40 odor-infused felt-tip pens,participants chose which of four wordson a screen matched the smell. On thesetasks, the superior smellers and thesuperior navigators turned out to be oneand the same.Scientists linked both skills to spots inthe brain: The left orbitofrontal cortexand the right hippocampus were bothlarger in the better smellers and betternavigators. While the orbitofrontalcortex has been tied to smelling, thehippocampus is known to be involved inboth smelling and navigation. A separategroup of nine people who had damagedorbitofrontal cortices had more troublewith navigation and smell identification,the scientists report October 16 in NatureCommunications. Dahmani, who’s now atHarvard University, did the work whileshe was at McGill University in Montreal.A sense of smell may have evolved tohelp people find their way. Specific as-pects of smell, such as how good peopleare at detecting faint whiffs, may also betied to navigation, the researchers say.— Laura Sanders

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A child buried in an ancient Roman cemetery
had a stone placed in the mouth as part of a
ritual to keep the body from returning to life.